How Sci-fi Writer Octavia Butler’s Invented Religion Predicted 2020 Chaos

In 1988, aspiring novelist Octavia Butler wrote an affirmation on the back cover of a spiral notebook.

“I shall be a bestselling writer,” she wrote in a thin blue marker slanting uphill across the cardboard. “Each of my novels will be on the bestseller lists . . . My books will be read by millions of readers . . . This is my life. I write bestselling novels.”

One of the book covers of “Parable of the Sower.”

Fourteen years after her sudden death at age 58, Butler’s affirmation finally came true. In October, her acclaimed 1993 novel “The Parable of the Sower” debuted on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

Part of the novel’s current appeal is how eerily predictive it is. Set in a dystopian Los Angeles in the 2020s, the economy has collapsed, corporations enslave consumers, police are not to be trusted and Southern California is on fire and overrun by murderous gangs.

And on the horizon is a presidential candidate with support from a newly-emboldened Christian right whose campaign slogan is “Help us make America great again.”

But the foundation of the novel is an imagined religion Butler called “Earthseed” whose scriptures boil down to one central, mantra-like tenet — “The only lasting truth is change; God is Change.”

That message, Butler scholars say, is crucial to the novel’s staying power and its appeal to a wider audience that catapulted it from the backlist to the bestseller lists.

“I think Earthseed is ultimately trying to get at what is at the root of religion,” said Tamisha Tyler, co-executive director of Art/Religion/Culture (ARC) who is at work on a theology dissertation about Butler. “It's ultimately change. Everything changes. And so the best that we can do is to ride those waves of change and navigate them the best that we can.”

“The Parable of the Sower” and its 1998 sequel, “The Parable of the Talents,” are speculative fiction — the term for science fiction, fantasy and futurist works. The heroine, Lauren Oya Olamina, is the daughter of a Black Baptist minister. Lauren “discovers” Earthseed and leads a small band of followers out of the ruins of Los Angeles to found a commune in Northern California.

“Together they are the autobiography of a fictional character who creates a new religion and sets humanity’s feet on a different path,” Butler told Charlie Rose in a 2000 interview. At the time of her death, she was working on “Parable of the Trickster” in which Lauren’s spiritual descendants take Earthseed to other planets.

When “Sower” first appeared, it made a stir in the speculative fiction world. Butler was a rarity — a Black woman publishing science fiction. A year later, Butler was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship — the first speculative fiction writer to receive the so-called “genius” grant — and in 1998, “Talents” won the coveted Nebula Award for Best Novel. 

But commercial success beyond the speculative fiction category was elusive. When Butler died after a fall in 2006, she was not a household name. 

Now that is changing as “Sower” and “Talents” reach a wider audience. There is a podcast called “Octavia’s Parables” and a webinar, “Octavia Tried to Tell Us,” that looks at the novels’ take on climate change, drought, displacement and the rise of the religious right. It is led by Tananarive Due, a speculative fiction writer inspired by Butler, and the theologian Monica A. Coleman.

Butler “was very passionate about the world and trying to preserve it in every way she could think of and trying to warn us off our path of destruction with every book in a different way,” Due said in 2017. “I think that’s part of the reason why so many readers are embracing her now because more of us are consumed with the questions she was consumed with. I think the rest of us are just catching up with her and realizing how precarious our existence can be.”

An opera based on “Sower” premiered in 2017 and played in Los Angeles, New York and Abu Dhabi, and next year the Library of America will release its first collection of Butler’s works. In Oct., the Los Angeles Times Book Club announced “Sower” as its fall selection and a new biography of Butler by Lynell George is being published this month.

There’s even a small, online religious community based on Earthseed.

Tamisha Tyler, co-executive director of Art/Religion/Culture (ARC) is working on a theology dissertation about Butler. Photo provided by Tyler.

Tyler traces the new interest in “Sower” to the 2016 election, when people started reading dystopian fiction with new fervor and put classics like Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and George Orwell’s “1984” back on the bestseller lists. Add to that the growing impact of climate change — central to the worlds of “Sower” and “Talents” — the 2020 pandemic and the social unrest of the summer, and Butler was just waiting to be rediscovered.

“The lockdown and all of these other things happening all at once created this dystopian world which Octavia Butler had already named and had given language and articulation to what people were trying to understand,” Tyler said. “I think that's why it got a lot of traction.” 

Natalie Russell is an assistant curator at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, Calif., Butler’s hometown and the place she left her archive. Russell curated a show of the archive’s materials — including the spiral notebook where Butler wrote her bestseller affirmation — in 2017. Butler, Russell said, considered religion an essential part of speculative fiction.

“She talked about the idea that science fiction often ignores religion or leaves it out entirely,” Russell said. “And she did not find that to be logical. She looked around and she saw that religion is a part of nearly every society and to assume it would simply disappear in our future didn't seem practical. So instead, she imagined what role religion might have in the future.” 

In the novels, religion is both a unifying and a dividing force. It both builds community and tears it apart. But Butler was less interested in whether religion is good or bad and more intrigued by the questions religion forces adherents to confront — what does it mean to be human, what do we owe each other and what are our obligations to creation?

“Part of what Butler was trying to say is that religion is ultimately the way in which we try to articulate our role in life and in the universe,” Tyler said. “She doesn’t say that religion is good or bad, but she says that we use it to try and articulate our role in life and in the universe.”

Butler was raised Baptist and she drew on the New Testament stories of Jesus for the “Parable” books. But she fell away from belief in her teen years, Russell said. 

“Butler talks about in interviews and other places that she had a very strict Baptist upbringing and that it informed her whole life,” Russell said. “It certainly informed her work and not just in a sense of morality. Its ideas and tropes and were something she drew on for her characters and plots.”

And while Earthseed was her creation, it was not her faith.  

“She was asked at one point if Earthseed was her religion and she said no, and she didn't even think it could be a religion because it's not comforting enough,” Russell continued. “It explains the world and it gives you a way to understand what's happening, but it's not comforting.”

Butler was a trailblazer and role model for women and people of color in speculative fiction, which also may be part of why she’s suddenly so popular. The list of authors with her literary DNA is long. Critically-acclaimed authors Marlon James and Junot Diaz have described her influence on them, and speculative fiction author N.K. Jemisin — winner of one of this year’s MacArthur Fellowships — once said she might not have become a bestselling writer if Butler had not shown her the way.

 “It would’ve been all too easy to give in to the little voices in the back of my mind, or the not-so-little voices from doubters among my loved ones, who insisted that my dream was unrealistic at best, laughable at worst,” Jemisin wrote on her blog on what would have been Butler’s 60th birthday. “So—thanks, Ms. Butler. If memory is the only true immortality, then may you live forever.”

Kimberly Winston is a freelance religion reporter whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today and more. She is the recipient of the Religion News Association’s 2018 award for best religion reporting at large news outlets.